Introspection and the External World:

The Individuation, Acquisition, and Awareness of Concepts

THESIS:

This book aims to motivate and defend a naturalistically appealing broad perceptual model of introspection.

Motivation:

An externalist account of the individuation of natural kind concepts favors a broad perceptual model over its rivals that do not allow privileged introspective judgments to be subject to brute error (Ch. 6).

The two main components of the model—a causal higher-order belief account of content awareness and a teleo-functional account of concept acquisition—are independently appealing (Chs. 7-8).

 Defense:

Content externalism is a metaphysically attractive (Ch. 2) and epistemically viable (Chs. 3-4) position.

The broad perceptual model can, in spite of surface appearances to the contrary, adequately account for first-person authority (Ch. 9).

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Common Sense Psychology and Naturalistic Philosophy

Part I:

Content Externalism and Cartesian Epistemology

Chapter One: Cartesian Epistemology—Privileged Access and Common Sense Empiricism

Chapter Two: Content Externalism—The News from Twin Earth and Conflicting Reports from Dry Earth

Chapter Three: Knowing Our Minds but Not the World

Chapter Four: The Threat of Radical Content Skepticism

Part II:

Content Externalism and the Broad Perceptual Model of Introspection

Chapter Five: Accounting for Introspection

Chapter Six: Content Externalism and Concept Awareness

Chapter Seven: Our Awareness of Thoughts—A Causal Higher-Order Belief Model

Chapter Eight: Our Acquisition of Concepts—A Teleo-Functional Model

Chapter Nine: First-Person Authority—Reliable Self-Knowledge and the Immunity to Subjective Irrationality